CONTENTS· About
Team
· What do we do
· Marc#2: Open Call
· Upcoming
MARC Agora #1
· Archive
MARC #1
Exhibition: Curated Realities
Documentation of the process
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Home
ABOUT MARC
MARC is a multidisciplinary artistic research collective and a platform established by musician Giuseppe Doronzo, visual artist Roman Ermolaev, curator Michela Trovato Giancardillo and artist and researcher Andrea Knezović. Its central focus is to encourage and develop hybrid collaborative practices between artists, researchers and partner institutions. By producing interdisciplinary projects, think-tank workshops, symposiums and educational programmes MARC examines intersectionality, institutional ethnographies and overall topics of societal relevance.
Our Vision
Looking at the research as a form of artistry, and creativity as a form of enquiry - MARC has aligned itself as a communal entity constituted to support and celebrate hybrid practices and socio-cultural innovations. Examining contemporary urgencies through the multiplicity of perspectives, we tackle discursive paradigms and envisioning future potentialities through co-directed collective exercises forged in cooperation and creative diversity.
One of the central missions of MARC is to bridge the gap between different artistic fields and research trajectories by creating strategic partnerships and projects that produce and share discursive knowledge, ideas and professional opportunities.
MARC is forged in the cooperative spirit and collaborative attitudes placing communal prospect at the centre of its focus. Our primary goal is to create and strengthen an artistic research network that is gravitating around our programme. The mission of MARC’s social architecture is to create a cohesive, sustainable community of hybrids (hybrid creative practitioners) that fosters a sense of professional belonging, structure, opportunities and institutional support. Our community is comprised of artists, thinkers, researchers, academic misfits and unaligned creative practitioners that are expanding their creative interests while actively producing, collaborating and networking. MARC’s activities aim to promote and diversify the landscape of hybrid creative knowledge exchange by providing guidance, community and resources for the hybrid professionals.
Care policy
MARC is committed to the ideas and values of inclusive horizontal collaborations that nurture diversity, freedom of expression and fair conduct. Radical equality, respect and empathy are core values of our community. Our priority is to create a supportive creative environment that is enabling groups and individuals to strive towards their potential, as well as feel comfortable in expressing their uniqueness. We encourage and welcome multiplicity of mentalities, critical thinking and performances within our network and projects. We believe that only with a sincere approach to communal care we can grow sustainably and spring up new innovative futures.
TEAM
GIUSEPPE DORONZO

Giuseppe Doronzo (1987, Barletta, IT) is an Italian saxophonist and composer based in Amsterdam. Music Revelation 2018 for All About Jazz, he is considered as “One of the most exciting fresh voices in the jazz and impro scene in the world” (Trouw/Jazzism).
He focuses his research on the baritone saxophone, aiming to explore a vocabulary that bridges his background in contemporary classical music, jazz improvisation and micro tonal makam music. He has performed internationally with artists covering various fields of the international art scene including Michael Moore, Joe Lovano, Vince Mendoza, Mariem Hassan and Han Bennink. His composition works have been supported by the FPK and performed in international festivals and venues including the Shanghai World Music Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival, Sant’Anna Arresi Jazz Festival and the Bimhuis. Besides his music ensembles, he writes for film, dance and contemporary circus. In 2018 he founded the Amsterdam based record label Tora Records. He has been giving music workshops and lectures in several spaces and institutions together with the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (NL), New York University (US) and Marmara University of Arts (TR).
ROMAN ERMOLAEV
Roman Ermolaev (1991, Saint Petersburg, RU) graduated from the VAV Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2017. In the same year, he won the EYE Research Lab Award for best audiovisual work at the EYE Filmmuseum. In January 2018, he received the Young Artsupport Amsterdam Award, and his graduation project Holy Land became part of the EYE Filmmuseum collection. His work has been exhibited in various galleries, institutions and Film Festivals in the Netherlands and abroad, his films have been screened in the different film festivals including IFFR. He was teaching fine art in Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018-2019.
Roman is a multidisciplinary artist working on the intersection of film, animation, photography and installation art often approached through the analysis of historical events and their affects on the precarious living conditions of an expats living abroad. Concerned with the shifting paradigm for a foreigner as an unstable element of the society, he aims to explore the potential for an alternative course of history. As a contemporary image maker, Roman sees it as his responsibility to scrutinise the events, images and symbols of the past and remould them into the reality orientated towards the future.
MICHELA TROVATO GIANCARDILLO

Michela Trovato Giancardillo (1992, Roma, IT) graduated in 2017 from the Master in Cultural Studies from the KU Leuven (BE), after obtaining her bachelor in History and Tutelage of the Cultural Heritage at the University of Florence (IT). From 2015 to 2019 she worked as a curator and project manager in the Artist in Residence WOW Amsterdam. During her work at WOW Amsterdam, she produced a multitude of projects that reflected the multidisciplinary character of the residency. Facilitating and producing multidisciplinary and site specific projects has been at the core of her practice for about six years.In 2019 and 2020 she worked as a project manager for Museumnacht Amsterdam, where she was in charge of the outreach programme of the stichting in order to broaden the audience of the Museumnacht event.Since September 2021, she is working as a producer for Sonic Acts.
ANDREA KNEZOVIC
Andrea Knezović is a visual artist, researcher, cultural programmer and educator with a MARes in Artistic Research from the University of Amsterdam and a BA from the AVA-Academy of Visual Arts Ljubljana. Her artistic practice plays with semiotics and dialectics of value by examining — through poetic gesturing — correlations between institutional and identity politics. Knezović’s discursive research interests center around topics of liminality, value production, future mythologies of the cultural institutional practices and consequently their strategies of institutional care. Her practice can be understood as a close reading of subversive, liminal landscapes in which the individual negotiates the ideological mechanisms of cognitive capitalism within wider socio-political scopes. She investigates various identity protocols by probing different systems of self-care, strategies of re-imagining institutional mythologies and futures of collective psycho-cultural health. She uses speculative fiction as a forensic method to excavate and design research narratives.
Knezović is a board member of Salwa Foundation. She contributed to various discursive journals including MIT - Thresholds Journal, Lish Journal, University of Amsterdam Simulacrum Jurnal- Tijdschrift voor kunst en cultuur and Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and Mediterranean (Young Slovenian Artists). Her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world and is part of the SCCA-DIVA Archive collection. In 2013 and 2015, she was nominated for the Essl Art Award.
What do we do
The scope of our practice is to enable selected artists and researchers to innovate, explore and expand their creative enquiry by engaging in residency programmes, exhibition events, mentorship trajectories, workshops, symposiums and partnering projects. Our projects investigate through curated narratives vast relationships between instrumentalization of the imagination, potential strategies of future social designs and speculative institutional mythologies. As an ever-growing entity, we are also probing the boundaries between the theoretical speculations and the entropy of its applied manifestations —finding a middle ground between those dichotomous relationships through collective-creative envisioning.
By using unorthodox investigative, cross-discipline methodologies our programme and collaborations offer unique perspectives and solutions to artistic research and its particular focus topics. We aim to enrich the artistic research discourse by creating laboratories and
think tanks targeting specific social-cultural questions. Our goal is to strengthen and promote hybrid bonds between art & research in the Dutch cultural landscape and beyond.
MARC #2: Open Call
‘Mythologies of Certainty’
What are the ways we ritualize certainty in the age of hyper-narratives, geopolitical shifts, and 24/7 neoliberal regimes? What is it so endemic to our human nature that continuously seeks to construct and design scenarios that forecast and mythologise certainty? How do we measure it through culture and language? What are its roles in strengthening our sense of social dependability? And why do we fetishize certainty and adherently attach to it the idea of permanence?
The new topic of MARC #2, Mythologies of Certainty, aims to unpack such a definite construct by exploring and probing its social potency while negotiating different systemic, institutional and social implications. MARC is venturing into a creative search around the notion of certainty, and its performative and mytho-political aspects. How do we proceed sustainably in the age of crisis narratives? And can we rely on the presumed constructs of certainty to guide us forward, or do we need to revise entirely our relationship with it?
We invite applicants to join us in this creative and intellectual exploration and suggest, speculate, question or re-imagine the vast spectrum of fabulations around this notion, its mythological and performative aspects. The residency is imagined as a process-based production, modelled by the residents and the guest contributors. Besides stimulating different creative outputs through experimentations, exhibitions and events—the programme serves as well as a think-tank hub that generates topic-related knowledge production.
We welcome researchers, artists, writers, curators, thinkers, musicians, designers, and savvy creatives to respond to the MARC 2# open call session and submit their perspective proposals.
We are looking forward to receiving your applications at the following email address: stichtingmarc.amsterdam@gmail.com
Important Dates
May 22th: Proposal submission deadline
May 27th: Interview with possible candidates
October 2022 - June 2023: Period of Artists in Cooperation Fellowship (A.I.C.F.) with an engagement of one week a month
June 2023: Presentation of the production
Application Requirements
All application documents must be submitted or translated in English. Your application should include:
- Curriculum vitae
- Application video (around 3 min, phone quality accepted), outlining your specific interest in participating in MARC’s activities, why you are interested in the topic and how your participation in the project will affect your practice
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Portfolio (see guidelines for each discipline here)
Selection Criteria
- Merit of past work
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Potential to develop creative practice and impact the community of MARC and beyond
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Readiness to engage with and benefit from the A.I.C.F.
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Applicants are professional artists based in NL (see guidelines for all the disciplines)
Goals
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To support and invest in individuals at the cutting edge of their fields, whose work will impact the cultural landscape at large
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To provide artists the opportunity to explore and experiment in a cooperative way
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To bring artists and thinkers into a dynamic community of local, national, and international artists: a professional network of creative practitioners and thinkers
Provisions and Production Facilities
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Research and exhibition space with partnering institutions (WOW Amsterdam, etc)
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Artists’ library
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Basic audio/video equipment
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Meetings with relevant guests
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Production tools
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Production budget (Contingent to grant application)
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Artist fee (Contingent to grant application)